The Effect of Material Price and Product Demand Correlations on Combined Sourcing and Inventory Management

Both material sourcing and inventory management are important competitiveness factors, and it is a significant challenge to integrate the two areas. In sourcing, combined strategies using long-term contracts and the spot market received increasing attention recently, typically concentrating on the financial effects. However, there is limited research on the consequence of combined sourcing considering both purchasing and inventory effects from an operations point of view. In this paper, we analyze the effect of uncertainty on the combined sourcing decision under stochastic demand and random spot-market-price fluctuations and exploit the benefits of forward buying in periods with low spot-price realizations, but also of intended backordering in case of a high spot price. Since the decision on capacity reservation has to take into account the short-term utilization of each source which in turn depends on the available long-term contract capacity, decision making faces highly complex interactions between long-term and short-term decisions.From finance research, we find scarce evidence that the spot prices of commodities evolve independently over time. Rather, price correlation across time periods is found, and a popular way to describe these price dynamics is to model it as a mean reverting process. Thus, in this contribution we will respectively extend common i.i.d. price models from operations management studies and will additionally consider the effect of correlation between demand and price. In this paper, we provide a managerial analysis showing the effects of demand and spot market price correlations on the optimal procurement policy and provide managerial insights. We model the combined sourcing problem as a stochastic dynamic optimization problem and analyze the optimal procurement strategy by means of stochastic dynamic programming. The behavior of the optimal policy confirmed several previous assumptions, though some interesting and important managerial consequences arise due to demand and price correlations. Based on the policy analysis, a numerical study will reveal to which extent inobservance or misspecification of an existing level of correlation might result in performance losses in operational decision making. These observations play an important role under the trend of increasing volatility and dynamic changes on the spot market but also in the customer’s behavior

The role of the abandonment option in strategic capital allocation: a review of selected literature

We review the most relevant contributions to the abandonment option since the late 1960s. We begin by approaching the contributions to the literature before the emergence of the real options approach to capital investment decisions, and thereafter, under a consistent real options approach, highlighting the interactions between the option to abandon and other types of options. We then identify the methodologies adopted, and the business sectors/ types of investment projects where the abandonment option is more frequently studied. We also debate the strategic role of the abandonment solution in corporate divestitures and under a game-theoretical approach. Finally, we present some concluding remarks and identify how certain gaps found in the literature may constitute opportunities for future research

Decision Models for Corporate Sustainability

<p>This dissertation explores decision problems faced by organizations willing to address or support the incorporation of sustainability aspects on their "business as usual" activities. We study to specific problems. First, we analyze the decision problem of a forest manager who, in addition to selling timber, has the option of selling carbon offsets for the carbon sequestered by the forest. We study both the single-rotation and the multiple-rotations harvesting problems, and develop stochastic dynamic programming models to find the optimal harvesting and offset-selling policy, the expected optimal harvesting time, and the expected optimal reward under different offset-trading schemes. Then, we study the case in which an organization (sustainability buyer) outsources sustainability efforts to another organization (sustainability seller). While buyers cannot directly exert sustainability efforts, they can provide economic or technical support to their sellers in order to incentivize these efforts. We investigate how the effort and support decisions change according to characteristics of stakeholders, buyers, and sellers. Considering that buyers can compete on the sustainability effort exerted by their sellers, we extend our analysis to the case of competing buyers, and we determine conditions under which sharing sellers is preferred by the buyers to having separate sellers for each buyer.</p>Dissertatio